EMC at its annual user conference, EMC World, in Las Vegas Tuesday, doubled-down on solid state storage with a strategy to accelerate enterprise adoption. Enterprises are gobbling flash like crazy, with no-brainer adoption of server boot drives and implementation of SSDs in storage arrays. In the last 16 months, EMC has shipped some 14 petabytes of SSD in their arrays. Of particular interest are several all-SSD Symmetrix VMAX arrays shipped and EMC’s development of a SKU specific to this type of product, available later this year.
‘Project Lightning’ is aimed at a server-centric implementation of a PCIe flash adapter for caching and DAS applications that don’t require shared storage such as trading and high-performance analytics. The speculation is which supplier will get the lucrative contract — the Register reckons it will be Intel, EMC President
Pat Gelsinger’s former employer. Project Lightning is expected to beta in the 3rd quarter with general availability later this year.
EMC will be qualifying MLC (2 bit per cell at 3x or 2x lithography) drives as part of this process. This will reduce the cost of enterprise drives. Also, EMC will be shipping all-flash versions of its VNX unified storage systems later this year.
Project Lightning adapters will add an additional tier of storage — server cache — for compute-intensive users. The technology will be integrated into EMC’s FAST data migration software so data can be more quickly moved from server to back-end storage.
As a way to focus sales and marketing resources on the lucrative flash business, EMC has created a flash business unit. This makes business sense as expertise in the new media is required, and the growth rate of enterprise SSDs is surprising even the flash experts.
